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The proliferation of mobile devices, equipped with numerous sensors and Internet connectivity, has laid the foundation for the emergence of a diverse set of crowdsourcing services. By leveraging the multitude, geographical dispersion, and technical abilities of smartphones, these services tackle challenging tasks by harnessing the power of the crowd. One such service, Crowd GPS, has gained traction in the industry and research community alike, materializing as a class of systems that track lost objects or individuals (e.g., children or elders). While these systems can have significant impact, they suffer from major privacy threats.

In this paper, we highlight the inherent risks to users from the centralized designs adopted by such services and demonstrate how adversaries can trivially misuse one of the most popular crowd GPS services to track their users. As an alternative, we present Techu, a privacy-preserving …